The Fitzgerald Syndrome

Sharing a birthday with the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing makes one think -- it provides an early lesson in distinguishing one's little world from the larger one outside.

By Alfred Meyer, published on March 01, 1992 - last reviewed on October 31, 2005

As luck would have it I happened to have been born on December 7th. Never mind which year. As a result, each birthday brings, with different intensities (depending on the state of Japanese-American relations at the time), the echo of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. While even casual friends find it easy to remember to send a greeting card or give a call, the association between these two coincidental events -- one a blip on the population chart of southeastern Michigan, the other the onset of a World War -- has, in my case, proved almost negligible. It did, however, provide an early lesson in distinguishing my little world from the larger one outside. For not once, not even during the most self-centered years, did I ever suppose that the attack was a deliberate attempt to mar the festivities of my occasion (let alone of my having been occasioned). This despite the fact that "Happy Birthday to you" is, in my mind, still inseparably linked with FDR's dolorous words.

This last birthday, however, stood out, certainly because it marked the 50th anniversary of the attack during a year when the mood in the country had already grown sullenly anti-Japanese, but also in part because I found myself, of all places, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Poor weather and a balky fuel pump caused my pilot friend to put his Cessna down in Asheville during a flight taking us from Washington, D.C., to Memphis.

Of all places because in the late '80s I had lived for a spell in Hendersonville, which lies a few miles from the Asheville airport. I knew the area: knew the ponds of Carl Sandburg's goat farm, where the Chicago poet spent summers, because that's where I had taken my dog for swims. Knew, too, the slick used-car lots on the main drag and the implacable greens of the golf courses on which platoons of Lacoste shirts wagered large sums against one another as a means of enlivening retirement.

What I didn't know back then was that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who not only captured the spirit of the Roaring '20s but who became a charter member of the "Lost Generation," had also been forced down in Hendersonville, though not because of engine trouble. His wife Zelda often admitted herself to the psychiatric ward of nearby Highland Hospital -- so he knew the lay of the land, in more ways than one. And by then he was written out, severely depressed, and nearly dead broke.

Though there is no plaque in town to recall his visit, it was in a third-rate hotel called the Skyland that Fitzgerald wrote the three essays for Esquire that together comprise "The Crack-Up" (a precursor of Styron's Darkness Visible) today regarded as a minor masterpiece of "confessional" literature. It was at Highland Hospital that Zelda perished, in 1948, trapped in a fire that gutted the hospital's top floors. Fitzgerald himself died in Hollywood of a heart attack at age 44 on December 21, 1940.

But that F. Scott plumbed the depths of his real and imagined failures here wasn't all that stirred the broth of recollection for me over those grounded days in Hendersonville. They also led me to associate the novelist with another, unrelated Fitzgerald, the former President. For the anniversary of his assassination two weeks earlier still in the air. Was it imagination or did the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's murder seem strangely more poignant this time round than in years past as though the ache of an old healed injury had suddenly reasserted itself?

It was not the crumbling of empires or dynasties that F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected on in the "crack-up" essays he came to Hendersonville to write. It was, instead, the crumbling of a talent and of a self -- both his. Whether manic depression, alcoholism, mid-life crisis, or a combination of these brought Fitzgerald down is still a question. His own sense of it, in general, was that he peaked early, and that he let himself be lionized into impotency afterward. It was as though, having written so often and so well in his fiction about fashionable parties -- bashes on Park Avenue flowered with debutantes, those in Greenwich Village sparkling with literati, ones on Long Island flush with industrialists -- he couldn't stop going to them until it was too late. He had become what he chronicled, a kind of self-invention that lost track of the distinction between art and life, between celebrity and the workaday world, and between his characters and himself. Long after the real parties were over, he took himself to a drab little town: "I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy -- why I had become identified with the objects of my honor or compassion."